Ironside was pulled into corners all night long. A small man with whiskers the color of carrots showed him land grants and sable farms that could be his should all go well. No one was quite sure what “all” or “well” meant. A Russia that was safe for them that was neither tsarist (they were sentimental but not idiots) nor Bolshevik?

After the umpteenth former baroness had attempted flirtation across the room using all methods short of a pickax, Ironside asked the orchestra leader to play that silly old chestnut “You Belong to Me.” He was thinking about his wife, about their last night at the Savoy. He hummed a few measures (“You know, ‘But tonight, you be-long to me’”).

The old conductor furrowed his runaway eyebrows and consulted for translation with his players, some of whom had better acquaintance with English than he. Finally, he clapped his baton against the stand twice to order silence, and announced to the audience in his fearsome high-caste St. Petersburg diction, “Our new military leader requests a song. It is apparently called ‘I Own You.’”

There were gasps. The guests eyed the exits. For the rest of the evening, no one tried to bribe Ironside.

18

In France there were fifty-seven types of weather, as long as you liked rain. Lee and Ripley had flown in a rare cluster of hours between storms, but now, with the afternoon coming, storm clouds were piling up, and the first raindrops would be falling soon.

They were miles away from home, in unspecified territory, next to a building that was rapidly being consumed by flames. A DH 4 needed at least thirty yards to attain flying speed, and they had but twenty yards of unbroken field, the rest of it dotted with hacksawed grape stalks. And there was the matter of needing three men to turn the propeller.

Lee paced around the plane, making a complete circle. He regarded the field with eyes like scythes, as if a straight line thirty yards long might appear if only he stared with enough force. He was talking in a small, reassuring voice. “We’ll all be fine,” he was whispering.

A bead of rain hit his cheek. His arms were locked in cradle position, dogs pressed against his chest under layers of clothing. He worried that they didn’t have enough air, and when he unbuttoned his jacket slightly, he worried that they were too cold. He whispered “Kriegshund,” because it was so rare that in wartime a word meant exactly what it sounded like. Generally, things were named ironically, as if to annoy you and harden you to misfortunes. The thought led him to reimagine how he’d skidded against the other puppy, which he felt as a phantom pressure as real as that of the other two now in his shirt. He wondered how he would feed them, and that led him back to the too-stifled/too-cold conundrum, which deposited him at another whisper of “Kriegshund.”

“Duncan?”